Pacific Beat

Chapter 15

Dennison and Dwight Innelman met them at the county impound yard. The yard was ten miles from the coast, and the late-morning haze had metastasized into a suffocating, corrosive smog. The four men stood looking at Ann’s old Toyota as if a moment of silence was called for. Beside it stood Emmett Goins’s Chevrolet.

Raymond gave Dennison an evidence bag with the tie tack in it, and told his chief the story. Brian held the bag up to the polluted light and jiggled it, then handed it over to the detective.

Innelman took off his aviator shades and studied the tack, probing at it through the plastic. “How come he was so eager to give it to you, but not to me?”

“He doesn’t like your attitude,” said Jim.

Smile lines formed at the corners of Innelman’s mouth. “Guess I’m losing my touch.”

“Plus, we plied him with truth serum.”

“Now I see.”

Dennison told his detective to take the diamond into evidence, get it to Robbins for blood and latents, then run a trace with the local jewelers. Innelman set the bag carefully in the briefcase that stood at his feet. Brian turned to Jim. “Brief me on Blodgett and Kearns. You can talk in front of Dwight — he knows the... situation.”

Weir glanced at Innelman, who, still kneeling with his briefcase, regarded him deadpan from behind his sunglasses. For the first time since he’d taken on Dennison’s task, Jim felt a tug of diminishment. The men were the men, and the blue was the blue, and quitting to do something else hadn’t fully released him from that bond. But things were priorities now, and the first priority was Ann.

He told Dennison about Blodgett’s fifty-minute “coffee break” with the whole north-end patrol, the out-of-beat squad car that came off the bridge at midnight and headed south, the aborted fishing expedition of the night before. Then Kearns’s twenty minutes off-radio between 12:30 and 12:50 A.M.

Dennison shook his head slowly and muttered, “Jesus.” His eyebrows furrowed and rose; then, an odd smile as he turned to Ray. “You wouldn’t spend an hour at the doughnut shop, would you?”

“The Whale, maybe.”

The chief chuckled. Weir realized how hard Dennison had to work to legitimize himself to his men: His rise from captain to interim chief to leading mayoral candidate had been too quick for anyone’s comfort but his own. “He’s sure that unit coming off the bridge was one of ours?”

“No. He’s not sure.”

Dennison stared off into the hovering smog. “Too bad the chopper was down. Those guys see everything. Now, about Blodgett. He’s some kind of fishing freak — spends every spare minute out in his boat. I wouldn’t make too much of that. He might have been shaking down some new gear.”

“Was he on patrol?”

Dennison looked at Weir, then Ray. “No. But I’m sure he’s got a reason.”

Weir was surprised to see Dennison defending Blodgett, the only officer on his force actively working to defeat him in the election. Brian has a thin line to walk, he thought: Be thorough, be fair, but convincingly kick Becky’s ass on June 5. Maybe the sheer publicity of Blodgett’s dissension was what kept Dennison on the level — anything less than fair play on the chiefs part would alienate his men, and make good fodder for the press. “Blodgett wasn’t out long enough to shake much down. Fog. Middle of the night, out on the same bay where we found Annie. Why?”

Dennison considered, his eyes again moving from Jim to Raymond. “That’s all, Weir.”

“That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“You don’t understand me. You’ve done your part. It’s over. You’re done.”

Jim felt sucker-punched, a little rush of breath leaving his chest. “Kearns and—”

“You’re done, Weir. That’s all, and that’s it. You got enough for me to think about, so I’ll think about it, right?”

“Kearns and Blodgett have a lot of answers to give,” said Jim. “I can get those answers. Give me a few more days. I can—”

“You can’t do a damn thing that Internal Affairs can’t do better.” Dennison smiled at Jim with a wicked little nod that Weir supposed was to underscore the cunning of bringing in Internal Affairs. “That’s right. I’m taking this to them. It’s in our lap now.”

Raymond stepped back and looked down, nudging at something with his shoe. He glanced up to Jim with a look that asked for caution.

Dennison clapped his hand over Jim’s shoulder. “Nice work, Jim. Look, we had a go at Goins’s bedroom in Costa Mesa. There are some things you should see. Dwight?”

Innelman knelt again, pulled an envelope from his briefcase, and handed it to Raymond. Jim looked over his shoulder as Ray opened it and took out the photographs. The top two were of the peninsula ferry, the next of Poon’s Locker-taken early morning, Jim could tell from the angle of shadow — then a picture of Ann’s Kids taken after closing. The last shot was of the preschool during an outdoor break, the play area filled with toddlers on the move. Among them, bending over slightly to help a boy onto a rocking horse, her hair spilling down around her face, her smile calm and lovely, was Ann.

Jim felt a warm flush come to his face. He heard Raymond’s breathing deepen and slow.

“It’s a telephoto shot,” said Innelman. “She doesn’t know he’s out there, is my guess. He sniped her. Robbins ran the originals and got what you’d expect — Goins’s fingerprints on the edges. These are copies.”

“He shot from the water,” said Jim.

“Used the ferry,” said Ray.

“That’s our guess, too,” said Innelman. “Or he could have rented one of those little motor dinghys. Goins couldn’t have much money unless he’s been pulling some local jobs, so the ferry seems most likely.”

Raymond stared at the last picture. The silence widened. Ray looked first at Jim, then to Dennison and Dwight. “Where the fuck is this guy? How hard can it be to—”

“We’ve got extra men on a door-to-door right now,” said Dennison. “The newspapers will help. We’ll get him, don’t worry.”

“Who developed the originals?” Raymond’s voice had taken on a calm that Weir could vividly recall — the adrenaline cool of pursuit.

“He did. He moved out the hardware when he left the Island Gardens.”

Weir asked about a hair sample to match the one found I on Ann’s blouse.

“No match. Robbins already tried. But that hair could have been a floater, we know that. It doesn’t let Goins off the hook — not even a little.”

Innelman gently took the pictures back from Ray. “I’m having Robbins run my hair, and Roger Deak’s. We contaminate things sometimes, no matter how hard we try. You and Jim ought to give him a sample, too, just to save time. But the other physicals match up, Ray — blood type B positive, right-handed, same weight as the guy who left the prints at the crime scene, same size feet. We’ll run genetics as soon as we have him. I talked to Mrs. Connaught — the old woman that Kearns kicked up. I looked out her bedroom window. Where she saw the car was where someone would park to take the path down. She looked at a picture I shot of Goins’s car — from above — and she says it looks the same. We took soils from some of Goins’s shoes — Robbins says one pair has some salts and silicas that indicate a saltwater estuary. He was down there, we just haven’t established when. We’re building, we’re getting closer.”

Dennison took Raymond’s arm and moved off to Goins’s car. They stood examining the primer patch on the driver’s door, but Weir couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Innelman checked his watch, looked over at his boss, then came closer to Jim. His voice was flat and quiet. “You should know this. Blodgett got drunk at a party a few weeks back and said he’d seen someone dumping in the bay. He couldn’t catch up, or lost them, something like that. I know Ann had been out with him on Toxic Waste. Blodgett’s got a terrible temper. There were rumors he burned out a gill netter last year, just for the fun of it. At the party, he’s drunk and he says if he catches the dumpers, he’ll sink their boat with them in it. He hasn’t done that, yet, so far as anybody knows. But maybe Ann saw something. Knew something. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this, I’ve known Blodgett for eight years and I don’t know him at all. Internal Affairs is a joke. Got me?”

“Got you. Why would a cop burn out a commercial fisherman?”

“Blodgett’s a fascist sportsman. He and the tree huggers don’t like the netters taking out so many fish, choking all those sea lions in the mesh. He volunteered for the Toxic Waste job. Blodgett’s got the same attitude about the water that all these so-called environmentalists have — he thinks it’s his.” Innelman glanced over toward the chief. “None of what I just told you is Dennison’s favorite topic, because if he gets in Dale’s face, it makes Brian look bad. Politics. Personally, I think Dale’s a loose cannon.”

“Thanks, Dwight.”

“There are people who know more about all that than I do. Your mother, for instance, or Becky Flynn. Just so you know, we haven’t kicked up Ann’s journal yet. Love to get my hands on that thing.”

Innelman turned and headed for the Crime Lab. Dennison left Raymond with a handshake and came back over to Jim. “Thanks, Jim. You helped me out — helped us all out.”

“Let me stay on Kearns and Blodgett for a few more days. No charge.”

“No way. It’s in our court now. Trust me, I’ll get the answers we all want.”

He walked off toward the helipad. A moment later, the NBPD chopper lifted into the air and angled west.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of his sister’s car, amidst the faintly lingering scent of her perfume, Jim was drawn into memories of Ann so specific and immediate, they frightened him. The all-night talks they’d had, when Ann dispensed her greater wisdom — greater by two entire years — regarding girls, guys, parents and how to get around them, school and how to keep it easy, church and how to get out of going. He could see a picture of her taken when she was a few days old, wrapped in a pink blanket with a bow taped to her bald head, and he could remember being astonished that his older sister could ever have been so young; he could see her in a pair of overalls sitting in her wagon, grinning with two front teeth bucked enough to open a beer bottle on; could see her waddling down to the water of the bay with a green plastic shovel in her hand; see her on that same beach a few years later, thin and dark and hard as a piece of wood — much the envy of Jim’s younger friends; see her on roller skates, flying down the peninsula sidewalk with a book in front of her face; see her tearfully boarding the plane one summer, bound for France, to, as Poon had put it, “get some Frog culture”; see her coming down the stairway in the big house in a blue dress for the junior prom — it was the first time that Jim realized she wasn’t actually a girl any longer, or perhaps that he was no longer actually a boy — and Raymond there at the bottom glowing with unabashed pride at this, his undeserved princess; he could see her folding helplessly into Virginia’s arms when they heard about Jake; could see the sudden fury in her that night she pushed Ray off the pier, then, in shock at her own act, jumped in after him; could see her later that same night wrapped in blankets in front of the fireplace in the big house, her hair slicked tight against her head and her eyes filled with a profound distance, as if she was still in France, and yes, there was something different about her when she came back, something experienced but unspoken; he could see her just a few nights ago standing at Virginia’s table in her silly, frilly skirt, bringing her own special class and dignity to a job that required neither; see her... see her... see her... fragments from the parade still going on inside him, if nowhere else.

In Virginia, he thought.

In Ray.

In whoever last touched her, took her life and left his seed, arranged the roses for her final journey into the unredemptive waters of the Back Bay.

A shiver rocked through Jim’s body, all the way to his feet. His eyes were filled with heartbeats. The sound of Raymond’s voice penetrated the reverie.

“... I said, what the hell is this?”

“Huh?”

“You all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“You don’t look all right.”

Weir took a moment to bring it all together and try to make sense of it: this car smudged with fingerprint dust and festooned with impound tags, this smell of perfume, this absent woman who was his sister, this blood of hers — and his — spilled so generously on a ground that neither deserved nor wanted. “It comes out of nowhere,” he said.

Raymond was quiet for a moment.

“I hate it, Ray,” he said, staring through the windshield, through the poisoned atmosphere of inland Orange County. The air looked like smoke. The car parked across from them was a red Porsche with bullet holes in the windshield and headrest. “I hate what he did to her.”

“I do, too, but there’s no time to hate, Jim. We have to find him. And when we find him, we kill him — like I said.”

“You know, that’s actually starting to make sense.”

“Of course it does. You’re not a treasure hunter. You’re not a brother. I’m not a cop, or a husband, or a law student. Look down on us like God does, and what you see is just two men who have to kill someone. Because he deserves it, and because he’s asked us to. It’s simple.”

Weir regarded Raymond’s calm face. He could almost believe him. He had tried his best to keep away from this kind of thinking, tried to keep his head clear, tried to act in a way that would lead him to the truth about Ann. But the grief would hit him without warning and he would realize how present it was, how small was the distance at which he managed to keep it. And the grief was married to the anger.

Raymond looked down at his hands. “I sat in my study the other night and looked at all those beautiful law books. I love the law. I love the way it defines and clarifies. I love the way it’s always ready to be more defined, more clear, more fair. But I realized what a gap there was between that law and what happened. You see, those are just ideas. Ann was real. Our baby was real. When I looked at Ann lying on the ground down there, it changed everything I believed. The law, and what I’ve stood for? It’s an illusion. These ideas — that we’re a nation of laws, that God in heaven watches over us like he does the sparrows — they’re illusions. The only things that aren’t are flesh and blood, and what we can feel and touch and see. What I’m going to do is take vengeance. You can hold vengeance in your hand. It’s real. They could strap me into the chamber for it, and I wouldn’t blink. I promise you, Jim, I wouldn’t blink, not once. And don’t tell me what Ann would have wanted me to do, how Ann would have wanted me to carry on and forget someday. That’s the biggest illusion of all.”

Weir leaned back and stared at the torn headliner above him. “I know.”

“I know you do. So what we have to do, right this second, is figure out why I’m holding this thing in my hand. I don’t want to be holding it, because it’s telling me something I don’t want to believe. Jim, what is this?”

Weir looked down. “That, Raymond, is the control for an automatic garage-door opener.”

“That’s right. And we don’t have an automatic garage-door opener at home.”

Jim took the unit. It was a standard brown plastic box with a clip for the sun visor and the words DOOR GENIE on it.

Raymond was quiet for a long moment. In the periphery of his vision, Jim could see him looking through the window at Horton Goins’s Chevrolet.

Jim turned the thing over in his hand. It seemed inordinately light. Strange, he thought, how something so insubstantial, so mass-produced and impersonal, can land on a man’s life with such tonnage. There was no way he could explain its presence, other than as a posthumous confession that Ann had been going somewhere she didn’t want Ray to know about, sliding right into a waiting garage, leaving her approved world behind, making the leap into the invisible, the illicit, the secret.

Raymond glanced at him now, an expression of denial so feeble, it turned to confirmation before he could look away again. “I thought at first she was dressed up that night because she was coming to meet me at the station. She used to do that — come down and meet me when I got off. She’d put on a sexy dress and makeup, do her hair. You wouldn’t believe what a sight she was, done up that way, waiting for me. One time, we did it right in the Toyota, alongside Coast Highway. One time, we got a motel room because we couldn’t wait. Just like kids.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t, either.”

“The roses, the clothes she was wearing, the street clothes that Ruff saw, the diamond tie tack, a garage-door opener that doesn’t work at your house.”

Jim idly flipped open the battery compartment and found it empty.

Raymond gazed out the window again and Weir followed his line of vision out past Goins’s car, through the chain link, over the Health Department building and into the unemphatic sunshine of a cool spring day. “She had enough opportunity. She could have done it easy enough, with me gone all the time.”

Raymond said nothing for a long while. Weir understood that for Ray to confront Ann’s loyalty was to shake one of the foundations on which he had built his life. “I don’t think she’d play the field. I think if, uh, if Annie was really going to see someone, he’d have to... mean something to her.”

The last words were so faint, Weir could hardly hear them.

“Any ideas, Ray?”

Raymond drew a deep breath. Jim never heard it come back out. “No.”

Weir thought of Kearns’s description, the capacity to go through with things, Ann the Ulterior. He told Raymond what Kearns had said.

Raymond looked at him again, layers of betrayal visible in his face. “If he thinks what Annie really wanted was to get her ashes hauled, I guess that’s no surprise. That’s about how deep Phil Kearns goes.”

“Did you see anything between him and Ann?”

Raymond shook his head.

“What about Dale Blodgett?”

“Come on.”

The fundamental question still hovered in the air, furtive, unanswered. “Say Ann had a lover. Did he kill her?”

“No one who knew Ann could have killed her,” Raymond said quietly. “That’s my opinion.”

“The crime stats would say you’re wrong.”

“The crime stats would say I did it.”

“Did you?” The question came out before Weir could stop it. It was the kind of question a cop would ask a cop. Ten years of law enforcement lead to habits.

Raymond answered without a beat. “No.”

“Sorry.”

Raymond shook his head. “Don’t be.” He sighed heavily, slid the battery-compartment lid back onto the opener, put the opener in his pocket. “I’ll get this into evidence, where it belongs.”

They rifled through the glove compartment and under the floor mats, through the usual oddments that collect in a car. Impound tags indicated the goods looted by Innelman, then by Robbins’s minions, for further study: two coffee mugs, an unlabeled audio tape, the lighter and ashtray, an envelope of “snapshots, personal,” two hairs taken from the driver’s side headrest, one from the passenger’s side.

Raymond opened the door for air and breathed deeply. “I spent some time in the hospital, realizing some things. Ann and I were good together — we had our ups and downs — but overall we were good. She’d had a hard winter; she was locked up inside like she’d get when she’d think about not being able to have a child. I knew the pattern, so I didn’t press it. When I got out of the hospital yesterday afternoon, I didn’t go home. I went down and parked by the Whale’s Tale, then I drove to where they found her car. A couple of things hit me. One was, Annie was probably going to see a lover. So I started wondering what kind of man he would be. What I think is, he would be different from me, totally different. You have affairs because you feel neglected or bored, right? So you seek out someone... fresh. I’m just a cop. I act like a cop, I think like a cop, I make the money a cop makes. So let’s say she’s met a high roller at work. Maybe a guy with lots of money coming in — a privileged man, a mover. She sees him, they come together, it’s good. One night after work, she changes into something real sexy. She’s offering herself to him, her body for his pleasure. Say for a minute that he was the one who killed her. What’s hard for me to imagine is the arrogance, the waste of it. What I see is a guy used to getting what he wants, used to that kind of destruction. A guy with a towering ego, who could actually think of Ann as property, a consumer good. Someone with power and bucks. Some guy who thinks he’s above the law. She goes to see him, he takes her to the Back Bay, and he’s so sure of himself, he leaves her car in his neighborhood. I sat in my car on the street there, where they found Ann’s, and it’s the high-rent district — money and power. I think she got mixed up with a man who thought he owned her.”

Weir listened. Raymond’s profile made sense. Ann would choose the opposite of Raymond, someone to be the jewel of intrigue in her secret life. “It would be in the journal. The journal would be at home.”

Raymond brought his hands to his face, pressing his fingers into his temples. “Innelman and Deak turned our place inside out. I spent last night doing the same thing, then I went down to the preschool and did it again. She either hid it awfully good, or someone else has it. Maybe, she took it to him.”

“Along with a dozen purple roses.”.

“Right.”

“Why?”

They got out and shut the doors. Raymond didn’t answer until they were back in Jim’s truck.

“I think,” said Raymond, “she was telling him it was over. She was going to be a mother and her fling was done. Maybe she took him the diary because it was like letters to him, his story, something he could have to remember her by.”

Weir played it through. “It would make more sense to just chuck it in the bay, get rid of it.”

Raymond shook his head. “That’s not her character. Annie kept things — friends, memories, pictures — you name it. Annie was a keeper. If she wrote a diary, she wouldn’t just toss it in the water.”

“She wouldn’t give it away, either.”

“She gave more than that away, my friend.” Raymond went quiet for a moment. Weir could hear the hiss of his breathing, slow and deliberate. “How old is Horton Goins, twenty-four? Maybe that’s all it was. A tumble with a good-looking kid who turns out to carry a knife.”

Weir said nothing. It didn’t play. But on the other hand that’s exactly what Horton Goins had been to a girl named Lucy Galen in Hardin County, Ohio.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Raymond.